


it can wait all day

by dotdotmoon



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Fairies, M/M, Mutual Pining, Nonbinary Side Characters, Promises, Unresolved Romantic Tension, home improvement store, kinda. there is plenty of handholding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-13
Updated: 2020-11-13
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:21:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27375625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dotdotmoon/pseuds/dotdotmoon
Summary: Minseok doesn't suspect Kyungsoo of forgetting about the kiss he promised him—but he certainly won't tire of reminding him anytime soon.(fairy au)
Relationships: Do Kyungsoo | D.O/Kim Minseok | Xiumin
Comments: 1
Kudos: 21
Collections: ExOnce Upon A Time: Round III





	it can wait all day

**Author's Note:**

> for prompt PIII03: minseok is a fairy who lives in the lighting section of home depot and waits for kyungsoo from the paint section to come and kiss him
> 
> (i've never been to home depot so this is a mix of a home improvement store and ikea?)
> 
> ty to the prompter for this very cute incentive to write xiusoo. i hope you see this!
> 
> tysm to the mods for their incredibly gentle patience ;;; and also for keeping claiming open until the very end and making it possible for writers like me to join!!

"I could _kiss_ you," Kyungsoo says, casually, like it's something he tells his acquaintances every day.

Minseok could be wrong about that, doesn't know him well enough yet, doesn’t know if it’s something he’d say to anyone, just for taking him to the roof of the store to stare down into tree crowns and feel the wind tearing at them. And yet, when he turns to look at Kyungsoo, the smile on his face is so small but moonbright that Minseok—dares.

"Would you, though?" he asks, leaning forward, hands on the ledge, ankles crossed, unafraid of the darkness below, his heel bumping against concrete in a busy, soothing rhythm. "I'd like you to," he adds when Kyungsoo looks right back at him.

A sudden breeze ruffles their hair and Minseok entirely forgets to fix his, drawn in by Kyungsoo's eyes. He leans into the hand settling on his shoulder, into the fondness he's met with, traces the shape of Kyungsoo's mouth with his eyes, a shape he'd like to be familiar with, reaches to lift Kyungsoo's glasses out of the way to not get them smudged—before he remembers.

With a small noise, Minseok turns away, lets all tension bleed out of the moment.

Kyungsoo sinks into himself a little but keeps his hand still on Minseok's shoulder, their connection unsevered. "It's the dog from earlier, yeah?" he asks after an audible swallow.

"It's the dog," Minseok confirms, attempts to physically shake off the memory of a small dog tongue all over Kyungsoo's face.

Kyungsoo hums, and Minseok feels cold when he takes his hand off his shoulder, until it finds his on the ledge, until he leans his temple against Minseok's shoulder instead.

"I'll see you next week?" Kyungsoo asks, fitting his fingers between Minseok’s.

Minseok doesn't miss the hopeful tone, the clammy skin against his. He’d always thought Kyungsoo seemed unsteady around him, jittery in a way that didn’t suit him back when they'd first met, a while before Minseok warmed up to his charms. "Three days, that’s a long wait,” he says with a smile.

Kyungsoo just sighs into his shoulder, but it’s a content sound, a promise ripe and soft as a peach.

Kim Junmyeon's idea of transparency is having his desk right in the middle of the home improvement store, and Minseok can't fault him for that. It makes it so much easier for fairies like Minseok to just drop out of the sky once they feel like their day has been sufficiently boring and there’s a buzz under their skin to mingle with humans—and keep up the illusion that the fairies lived in the store.

Minseok couldn't imagine a more awful home, and his enquiries as to why none of the humans moved into the store yielded the same results as had anyone asked the fairies: it wasn't a good nesting place.

The shoulder pads sewn into Kim Junmyeon's jackets are quite the opposite of transparency. Minseok appreciates them anyway, the alarmed shrieks whenever he drop-lands on them not so much.

"Oh, Minseok," Kim Junmyeon says with a chuckle, like Minseok hadn't just shattered his countenance. He pulls up something on his laptop, a spreadsheet so colourful fairy eyes hurt from just glancing at it. How Kim Junmyeon's never heard of pastels, Minseok doesn't know. "The desk lamps could need a little boost today," Kim Junmyeon says after some frowning, then turns his head to confirm his request was heard.

Minseok laughs at him when he looks down at the wrong, now unoccupied shoulder. He's long climbed over his back to the other side where Jongin's taken up semi-permanent residence. They're taking a nap, so Minseok picks some of the biggest dust specks off their cape. Kim Junmyeon is nothing if not a dust magnet. How he’s managed to charm Jongin, Minseok doesn’t know either.

“Desk lamps,” he recites when Kim Junmyeon’s eyebrow refuses to lie back down. It is easily tamed by a halfhearted beat of his wings, and Minseok takes the chance when he gets distracted by Jongin hiccuping to stuff the fistful of dust under the neat fold of Kim Junmyeon’s collar.

"Hello, Minseok."

Kyungsoo suddenly floats in front of him, black wings spread behind him, and Minseok's heart beats right out of his chest. Kyungsoo usually climbs the shelves, and it isn't until Minseok spots the paint cans in his hands and the basket tied to his waist—holding some rolled up cloth, a piece of sponge, a spray bottle and a quiver with paintbrushes and cotton swabs—that he understands.

"Touching up paint? I could show you some of the worst spots around here," Minseok offers. He also knows where to find an atrocious lamp with a dead light bulb and a shade so wide they could both fit under it.

Kyungsoo lands with a gentle thud of his boots against the shelf, folding his wings back and shaking his head no. "Don't let me distract you."

He's vanished behind a row of desk lamps before Minseok can even think of an answer. He sighs, and points a few lost customers to the lightbulbs a few shelves over.

"Minseok!" Yixing calls when he tumbles into the break room. "Help me out here?"

Minseok pats at the sweat on his temples before he joins Yixing in the fridge. He rushes to pry the lid off the plastic container some more, just enough so Yixing’s trapped arm is freed. To Minseok's horror, Yixing reaches even further inside, entire shoulder disappearing.

“Whose salad was that?” Minseok asks when they’ve safely landed near the dish rack. There wasn’t a name on the container, and quite a few of the employees didn’t take too kindly to having their lunch ransacked.

“They’re not going to miss a pansy,” Yixing says, smoothing out the petals that unwilt under the touch.

A scraping sound makes them both look up, then down where hands are holding onto the ledge of the counter before Kyungsoo's head peeks over it.

"Am I interrupting something?" he asks, as if he had arms made of rope, could dangle from the counter forever, stubbornly polite to a fault. Minseok wants to wipe at the sweat beading on his forehead, wants to smooth out his eyebrows like Yixing did with the pansy.

They both rush to heave him over the ledge—unnecessarily but Kyungsoo indulges them, plays the part of helplessness—Yixing laughing when they realise there's dirt on Kyungsoo's cape, his overalls and arms, streaks of old cobwebs, greyed and clumpy with dust.

"You flew into another one?" Yixing says, still giggling in disbelief.

Kyungsoo's reply isn't more than a grumble, and he slips off the cape, leaves his boots next to the tap as he peels off his overall, hops down into the sink.

Minseok lands where the dropped cape sits next to the sink to inspect it. "You should go home," he says, holding it up and trying to shake off the dirt that doesn't budge, "give it a wash."

"Can't," Kyungsoo says from below. "Kim Junmyeon asked me to stay. Would you turn on the water?"

Yixing's already hovering over the soap dispenser, purple pansy safely tucked under one arm, ready to step down on the pump.

"He can't just tell you what to do," Minseok huffs. He doesn't like how Kim Junmyeon keeps blurring the lines. Kim Junmyeon is nice enough to be considered a great nap spot by Jongin—but he keeps passing work to the fairies when they're mostly here for their own amusement. "We should go on strike."

"We could take a vacation, yeah. Have you ever been to the sea?" Kyungsoo sends a small smile up at him, too cleverly aimed for Minseok to dodge.

"You can't charm me into a hiking trip," Minseok tells him, right before he opens the tap, water slowly dripping into the sink along with a dollop of soap and Minseok's affection.

"Since when have the two of you been flirting?" Yixing asks, eyeing Kyungsoo as he dries off his arms and hair, then gazing over at Minseok who's picking strings of cobweb off the cape.

"Who's the pansy for?" Kyungsoo replies before Minseok can even decide if Yixing's right, and the thought barely takes hold in his mind when he sees Yixing's eyes widening.

“Kim Junmyeon,” Yixing says quickly, pressing the flower against Yixing's chest, wings spreading like an iridescent protective veil.

Yixing's gone with the next breeze coming in through the open window, and Minseok looks over to Kyungsoo to see him shaking his head.

"Jongin gets more flirting done while taking naps than we do wide awake," Kyungsoo muses.

"You think it's Jongin?" Minseok brushes his fingers over the cape, the elegant mosaic of shiny black pieces of beetle shell covering it.

"Who do you think ate the blossoms off all the flowers in front of the store that one time?"

Minseok thinks for a moment, recalls the time Jongin spent two days worth of miserable naps in a cushioned box on Kim Junmyeon's desk because every slight movement made them sick. Kyungsoo looks acceptably clean again so Minseok gathers the cape up, offers it to him. "I never connected the dots," he says.

"No fairy falls for Kim Junmyeon when Jongin's right there," Kyungsoo adds as he pulls on the cape, emerging with another one of those small smiles that make Minseok's heart feel too small to soak up all of their warmth. "Want me to fly you over to the lamps?"

"I want the kiss you promised," it tumbles out of Minseok although he knows—not here, not now. It's so close to lunch break, the break room will burst with chatter in no time.

Kyungsoo spreads his wings tentatively, gives him a look over his shoulder when he doesn't find them sticking to one another anymore. "I wouldn't forget," he whispers before he takes off, soaring along the ceiling before he slips out of the door.

Fairies drift towards each other, towards the traces their wings leave behind like invisible train rails, so it's no surprise their paths cross in the section where a bunch of couches are pushed up against each other, before opening hours. They exchange a greeting, a smile, and just when Minseok tries to think of something, anything to keep Kyungsoo around for a moment longer, he sees his frown.

"Hold still for a moment," Kyungsoo says and rounds him to peer at his cape.

There's a light touch to his shoulder, like a leaf floating down and settling for its last nap in autumn, and Minseok turns his head to see, briefly meets Kyungsoo's eyes before they both look down at his shoulder.

"I thought it was a loose thread but you've got a tear right here," Kyungsoo tells him, his hand halting before he can touch Minseok again. "Let me get my sewing kit."

Minseok flies up to sit on the backrest of a sofa with heat rising to his head as he waits, notices the slight strain when he tries to stretch his left wing, his right wing mirroring the movement. He pulls the hood of the cape out of the way and over his head before Kyungsoo comes hurrying back, the warmth now trapped to his head uncomfortably.

Kyungsoo climbs the sofa quickly and straddles the backrest to sit to Minseok's left. He must have run the whole way, judging by his flushed cheeks and the breaths he's sucking in. As if the tear was an emergency, not a minor inconvenience, a common occurrence. . .

A case holding thread spools is rolled out in the space between Kyungsoo legs, all sorted by colours, and he picks a few to hold against the cape for comparison until he settles for one. Minseok digs his heels into the backrest, bites his lip as Kyungsoo threads a needle, jolting a little when he taps his arm.

"Can I?" he asks, motions towards the tear, satisfied when Minseok turns so he can reach better.

"I do this all the time," Kyungsoo says, as if he'd found the impressive collection of thread spools on the floor his way back, "it won't take longer than a few minutes."

It's long enough for Kyungsoo to catch his breath as he works quietly, occasional hums aside, and just long enough for Minseok to feel lightheaded from the way he's sitting entirely still, even holding his breath to not jostle Kyungsoo's hands.

"Let me tie this up, then you're as good as new," he hears after a while, and one of Kyungsoo's hands slips under the cape to pull the thread inwards.

Minseok wonders—"I could have taken it off," he whispers into the safety of the hood, not expecting Kyungsoo to catch it, but finding an apologetic smile when he peeks past it. "Thank you," he adds hastily, flutters his wings cautiously to not hit Kyungsoo, feeling his magic sealing the mended tear.

"Anytime."

Kyungsoo's hand settles on his head, a sure, warm touch over the hood. Minseok is almost afraid of meeting his eyes when he feels his hand wander over the seam at the top, towards his face, feels his fingers trace the edge of the hood, down his temple, then tuck it behind his ear.

“Oh, you still have this?” Kyungsoo asks.

Minseok reaches up to touch what Kyungsoo is seeing, their hands brushing long enough for Kyungsoo to hold onto Minseok’s, rest them on Minseok’s thigh. It’s the flower pin he’s claimed back from Jongin last night, after they’d had their fill wearing it. “It was a gift from you,” Minseok says.

Kyungsoo leans just a little closer to look over the pin, then a little more, his gaze dropping to Minseok’s lips and Minseok—

“Opening in ten minutes, everyone,” Kim Junmyeon’s voice comes through the intercom, crackling so badly it startles Kyungsoo’s roll-up case into plummeting to the ground and has Kyungsoo diving after it.

"I’ll be waiting," Minseok yells after him when he takes off towards the paint section, and for now, there’s really nothing better than Kyungsoo twisting around, flying backwards just to send him another smile, wide enough to fit a laugh.

**Author's Note:**

> the fairies don’t have wings but charmed capes like [this one](https://aurorajay.tumblr.com/post/160302200157/tada-dye-painted-wool-felt-cape-part-of-my).  
> and here's [minseok's flower pin](https://twitter.com/xiupremacist/status/922730518067560449?s=20) ;;;
> 
> (jongin uses they/them pronouns, yixing uses none at all)
> 
> this didn't turn out quite how i wanted it to and i tossed a few ideas... but thank you for reading it!! please do let me know if you liked it!


End file.
